Rather not waste billions on stuff like this? Call your rep. Photo: dherrera_96/Flickr.

The folks at Transportation for America are urging supporters to call their representatives in Washington and give key decision makers a push in the right direction. 

The shape of the stimulus will have major consequences for Obama's domestic agenda. "The economic recovery package should send a strong signal on the rest of the legislative priorities that are coming up," said Robert Puentes, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a prolific author of infrastructure and transportation policy recommendations. "We know that after this legislation passes, we have a ticking clock with respect to the climate bill, energy legislation, and the next transportation bill. It's critical that the economic recovery package support a new way forward that's being promised with those other pieces of legislation."

The bill is expected to deliver up to $100 billion to transportation projects, or about two years' worth of typical federal spending. One of the big risks is that too much leeway will be given to states, which have an unhealthy appetite for highway expansion. "The big highway projects are eating up the majority of the money in many of the states," said David Burwell, a strategic consultant with T4A.

Most of the states' wish lists are shielded from public view. Of those that have come to light, it's clear that fix-it-first projects -- maintenance and repair of existing infrastructure -- are not a top priority, nor are transit projects. Gary Toth, a former director of project planning at NJDOT who now heads up transportation initiatives at Project for Public Spaces, has reviewed some of the state lists and what he turned up isn't pretty. "Florida's list is three-quarters expansion, 10 percent fix-it-first," he said in an email message. "On the highway side, Wisconsin asks for over $3 billion for two big expansion projects, less than $100 million for fix-it-first. Utah's list is almost exclusively populated with expansion projects; Missouri is two thirds; Kansas, three-quarters." Throwing all those billions at traffic-generating highway capacity projects would come at the direct expense of greener modes and overdue maintenance.

The highway lobby contends that their expansion projects are the optimal way to create jobs. Toth and others aren't buying it. "Each of those states easily have at least a billion dollars of bridge and road and pavement repair and maintenance needs that could be ramped up over the next two years," he said. "Yet, like an overweight diabetic who can't kick the sugar habit, these DOTs are spurning these absolutely critical maintenance needs in the quest for the seductive roadway expansion projects that elected officials just love -- if they are in their district."

You can see more state list breakdowns, including Utah's colossal $7.5 billion highway expansion ask, on the T4A website, which explains the modal bias at work behind the numbers:

This is not because road projects are "ready to go" and others are not. On the contrary, local governments and public transportation agencies have identified scores of transit, sidewalks and local road repairs. It appears that the DOTs often are simply leaving them off the list.

Puentes also believes that framing the debate as "job creation versus green priorities" offers a false choice. "The focus should be on both speed and quality -- that we're not just putting people to work and stimulating the economy in the short term, but that it's also the right kind of projects," he said. "While speed is certainly critical, we can do both. These goals don't have to be inconsistent with each other."

"He's putting his reputation and his brand in the hands of a bunch of state DOTs who don't care very much about the Obama brand."

Here's what Burwell had to say, in a nutshell, about the stimulus package. Stay tuned for more from the interview.

The transportation team realizes that the infrastructure piece is a problem and wants to address it, but they see it as a long-term issue, not a short-term one. The problem is, you can't spend this amount of money without affecting the re-authorization.

The transportation stimulus could be a bunch of bridges to nowhere. Obama's environmental team is looking not at the transportation infrastructure piece, they're looking at all the rest of it. They're saying, "Well, it's green. This really is a green stimulus package." And they're probably right, but the transportation piece is not green, it's gray-to-black.

This is HR 1. This is going to be the first bill Obama signs -- high visibility -- and if it has a bunch of roads to nowhere and bridges to nowhere, those things are actually going to be under construction within two years when the midterm elections are coming up. This is a threat to the Obama brand -- the idea that this is a new administration, we're going to do things differently, we're going in a new direction, we're done with the old way of doing business. Yet he's pouring all this money into the old way of doing business in transportation.

They don't understand the fact that they can't just say, "We want green infrastructure," and get green infrastructure. There's a provision of Title 23 of the United States Code, which governs highway spending, that says no matter what the feds say, the states have a sovereign right to pick their own projects. That's section 145. It says, regardless of what the feds say, "the authorization for appropriation of Federal funds... shall in no way infringe on the sovereign rights of States to determine which projects shall be federally financed." So he doesn't control the selection process once that money hits the state books. The feds have very little ability to influence it. He's putting his reputation and his brand in the hands of a bunch of state DOTs who don't care very much about the Obama brand. That's a big threat.

The best defense on how these moneys are going to be spent is to sub-allocate it, because it's the cities that build the bike paths, it's the cities that build the transit systems, it's the cities that run the bus lines, it's the cities that run the rail stations. If you want this money spent on new green infrastructure, get it to the cities. It's the states that run the highway system. If you give all the money to the states, you know exactly what they're going to spend the money on. I'd rather have Janette Sadik-Khan and Mayor Bloomberg decide how to spend this money than the division administrator of the state DOT.

The beginning of 2008 has seen a flurry of debate -- at least in wonkish circles -- over federal transportation spending. In January, the bi-partisan Surface Transportation Commission released a report two years in the making, "Transportation for Tomorrow," which was promptly badmouthed by U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters for a gas tax hike proposal and partially redacted by the Bush administration to remove a section advocating for public transportation. Just last week the White House proposed paying federal highway obligations by "borrowing" from a fund set aside for transit. With the federal highway bill up for re-authorization next year, huge sums of money are on the line, not to mention the direction of US transportation policy.

One of the new phrases getting tossed around in these discussions is "mode-neutral" funding, which entails allocating money based on pre-determined criteria and cost-benefit analysis, instead of earmarks for roads or transit. Here is FTA Administrator James Simpson (a Bush appointee and former MTA board member), addressing the American Public Transit Association last October:

“Don’t think mode, think people.”  That’s become our motto.

I believe that such mode-neutral thinking is central to a new paradigm in transportation.  I believe that we must stop thinking in terms of mode--no more highways versus transit or bus versus rail. Instead, we MUST think in terms of people and focus on our customers.

And here is syndicated columnist Neal Peirce, endorsing the transportation commission's report:

...the commission faced the necessity of a dramatic rise in the federal gas tax, to 40 cents a gallon, indexed to inflation. And it sought accountability by combining today’s 108 federal transportation funding lines (for transit, highways, railroads, etc.) into 10 goal-oriented programs such as “Congestion Relief,” “Energy Security” and “Saving Lives.” The system would be performance-driven, outcome-based, mode-neutral -- a far call from today’s morass of earmarked transportation projects and billions flowing to states for still more highways.

So would mode-neutral transportation funding benefit a livable streets agenda? The short answer: "It depends."

The long answer goes back to the end of 2006, when mode-neutral funding first gained currency. It was a guiding principle of the Eddington Report, an exhaustive study of the UK transportation network released that December. The report got attention for proposing a national road pricing mechanism, but several core recommendations were less audacious, calling for maintenance and incremental improvements instead of big capital projects.

"'Fix it first' comes out first," said transportation expert David Burwell, who answered my questions about mode-neutral funding in a phone interview last week.

That means expensive projects like Moynihan Station would probably have fewer federal dollars to count on, but less capital-intensive projects, like Bus Rapid Transit, may stand to gain. And a mode-neutral approach bodes poorly, as Peirce suggests, for costly road-widening projects that have no long-term impact on congestion.

In the end, much depends on the criteria used to evaluate performance. Hypothetically, a mode-neutral transportation agenda could set goals of reducing VMT and emissions, then dispense money to the most cost-effective means of achieving those outcomes.

For now, says Burwell, all the talk of mode-neutral funding in the US is moot, because "no one cares about performance; they care about earmarks."

"We don't collect the data that would allow us to have an effective cost-benefit analysis," he added. "The only performance measure that US DOT asks state DOTs is, 'Did you spend the money?'"

Photo: Marionzetta / Flickr

On Wednesday, Mobilizing the Region called attention to the Bush Administration's proposed 2009 transportation budget. While New York City stands to get welcome earmarks for projects like the Second Avenue Subway, the big picture is more sobering. The administration wants to transfer billions of dollars from transit to highways:

It proposes to shore up the Highway Account of the federal Highway Trust Fund (HTF) by “borrowing” $3.2 billion from the HTF’s Mass Transit Account. It would also cut national transit spending by more than $200 million from previously proposed levels.

What's going on here? I'll do my best to make it interesting.

The Highway Trust Fund has two components: By law, 18.2 percent is set aside for transit, and the rest for
highways. Problem is, the highway people have been spending down their part of the fund at an unsustainable clip, and they are on pace to run out of cash around October. If that happens, they will have to stop jobs -- cutting off exactly the kind of big-ticket construction projects that legislators love.

"That's going to be very unsavory from a political standpoint," says David Burwell, a DC-based transportation policy expert. "So they're robbing Peter to pay Paul."

The administration looks at the Transit Fund, which still has several billion left in the piggy bank, and sees a quick fix to postpone facing a long-term problem head-on. But raiding the Transit Fund would drop it, too, into the red within two years. In a letter of opposition, Maria Zimmerman of the national transit advocacy group Reconnecting America warns of this scenario:

Bush’s FY09 budget proposal would further push the cost and obligation of maintaining the multi-trillion dollar transportation system -- one of this nation’s greatest assets -- onto the backs of state and local governments.

Now the good news: The gambit is unlikely to succeed.

"The people on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee are going to scream bloody murder," says Burwell. "It's a violation of the spending structure established by ISTEA."

The most logical way to make up the shortfall, he believes, is to bump up the gas tax, but of course that's politically unpopular too. A more likely scenario will be a stop-gap measure like taking money from the general fund (which bumps up the federal deficit) or cracking down on gasoline wholesalers who cheat on gas tax payments (apparently this is a widely known problem that has gone largely unaddressed for some time).

In the not-too-distant future, more drastic measures will be necessary. The attempt to raid the Transit Fund is symptomatic of the same unsustainable financial situation that has caused the idea of privatizing highways to gain so much traction.

Burwell, an early champion of "context-sensitive" approaches to transportation projects, thinks privatization skirts the issue. "The solution is to figure out how to re-finance the Trust Fund and do it in a way that addresses public goals like reducing VMT and emissions."

The current authorization for the Highway Trust Fund expires on September 30, 2009, nine months after the new president takes office. The next authorization law will likely involve a commitment in the range of $300 to $350 billion over the next five years. Wouldn't it be great to hear the candidates weigh in on how that money should be spent?

Photo: Kaptain Krispy Kreme/Flickr